


Gangrene

by poisontaster



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Character Death, Gen, Gun Violence, Violence, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-30
Updated: 2006-04-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 02:51:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2212959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a code you see much. Usually when one of the science geeks at UNLV's been fucking around with something they shouldn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gangrene

**Author's Note:**

  * For [piecesofalice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piecesofalice/gifts).



> Written for the 2006 [](http://zombieficathon.livejournal.com/profile)[**zombieficathon**](http://zombieficathon.livejournal.com/). The request was: _Brass against an army of the undead, maybe headed by Grissom._ This is not exactly that.

Tipping the pager up so he could read the display, Jim Brass reflected that some days it wasn't worth the caffeine it took to get you out of bed in the morning.

The pager, unaffected by this train of thought, still displayed the same message in dark, stark LCD letters: **CODE: GANGRENE**

"What on earth's a 'code: gangrene'?" Sofia's got her own pager out, squinting at it in the bright late afternoon sunlight. She's forgotten her sunglasses again and the tip of her nose is starting to turn pink despite repeated applications of sunscreen.

Brass goes to the trunk of the car and pulls out the Mossberg. "It's not one you see much," he admits. He pulls the Remington too and hands it to Sofia. She takes it, but he can tell from her face she doesn't understand. Not yet. The squawk box in the car is squawking for real, and he sees the uniforms from the two cruisers also popping their trunks and going for the heavy arms. He doesn't know all of them, but Briscoe, at least, he knows was around the last time. "Usually when one of the science geeks at UNLV's been fucking around with something they shouldn't. It's the code for zombies."

Sofia laughs, one hand over her mouth as she does it. "You're not serious."

Brass nods at the uniforms, gearing up and tricking out. "Ask those guys if it's serious. Ask Jimmy Briscoe. Last outbreak, he lost his wife and his oldest boy." Brass hates the Kevlar; the weight and the restriction of his movement, but he breaks it out anyway, dragging the vest over his head without letting go of the shotgun.

"Last outbreak?" Sofia says skeptically, like she still thinks this is some kind of police hazing ritual, a snipe hunt. "Does this happen often?"

Brass shrugs. It's really unimportant if Sofia believes him now. She will. When the first dead-eyed freak comes at her, fizzing spit and God knows what else, she'll believe just like all the rest of them. "No," he answers finally, taping down Velcro and adjusting the fit. "Just when the…"

"…just when the science geeks at UNLV go fucking around with something they shouldn't," Sofia echoes, nodding doubtfully.

"Well, the military's usually a lot more…efficient about covering their screw-ups," Brass says lightly. He doesn't look at her, keeping a wary eye on the light scattering of pedestrians and onlookers around them. He wonders which strain got loose this time. Hopefully the slow burn. "Though they've had their share."

Sofia makes a face that tells him she's still not completely onboard, but she digs out her own gear and starts suiting up. "So…what do we do?"

Brass looks around and wonders who's infected already. He wonders who'll be the first he'll have to gun down. He hopes it won't be anyone he knows, but that's asking for a lot. He shrugs and goes for the driver's side. "Survive, mostly."

***

Sofia's adaptable, he's got to give her that. She hardly flinches as he sideswipes another deader. This is why he—and the department—buy American, instead of that crumply plastic they try to pass off as an automobile. Her voice only shakes a little as she asks, "I thought…I thought zombies came from voodoo?"

Brass looks sidelong at her. She looks a little pale beneath a ruddy layer of sunburn. Without a hand free, he makes the eyebrow waggle of 'wait a second' at her.

"Yes, David, I understand that," he says patiently to the hysterical man at the other end of the line, "but I need to know… David! Focus! I need to know what strain we're dealing with. You haven't heard anything?" Another babble, loud enough that Brass has to hold the cell away from his ear.

A deader charges the car, bounces off. The passenger side window cracks in hazy spiderwebs. Sofia gives a little yelping scream, quickly bitten off, and her knuckles tighten over the slide on her rifle. Brass swerves a little, but keeps grimly plowing forward.

"Look, David, I'll get to you as soon as I can, but in the meantime, a lot of people are really depending on you identifying the strain that got loose. You got any weapons?" The key thing is to get David thinking. If he starts thinking, he'll stop panicking and that means maybe—maybe—he'll live through this. "Okay, well, keep the bone saw handy stay behind locked d..."

 _"Jim—"_ Sofia's voice rises and turns cutting. He returns his attention to the road—when the hell did he take it away?—and has only time to see a flash of skin and white before the car strikes a body head-on. It crumples into the hood, into the windshield in a flash of clouded safety glass, and up over the roof of the car. They're both jerked forward as Brass's foot slams down on the brake pedal.

The airbags are slow; Brass meets his more than halfway to impact with the steering wheel, a mushroom cloud with the stopping force of a concrete brick. It knocks him back, into the headrest, and dazed, he watches as Sofia claws at her seatbelt to a muttered chorus of _ohgodohgodohgod_.

Brass tries to reach for her, sluggish alarm making his heart beat faster, but everything's still too hazy, his body unresponsive.

Sofia fumbles the car door open and scrambles out into the slanting red-gold sunshine and the heat hits Brass like a hammer. His last coherent memory is of his hand, lying on the seat like a dead bird, twitching as he tries to stop her.

"Ma'am? Ma'am, are you all right…"

Brass faded out.

***

"Jim? _Jim?_ " Hands on him, shaking him. He makes a protesting noise deep in his throat and tries to swat them away. "Oh God, Jim, you gotta wake up right now…come on, c'mon…"

Lifting his eyelids takes a lot more effort and concentration than he's used to. Brass opens his eyes to Sofia's face. Her neat blonde ponytail is pulled askew and is dull with ash. There's blood on her, face, neck and arms, some of it fresh, shocking crimson, some darker dried maroon, thick and clotty. "…the hell…" he manages weakly, a moment before it all comes rushing back in. The code. The zombies. He pushes himself up in the seat a little more, winded still.

Sofia gives out a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob when she sees his eyes are open and she fumbles with his seatbelt, trying to get him unbuckled. "Jim, you've got to get up, they… God, they…"

"Are you bitten?" he asks, pushing her hands away and undoing the seatbelt himself. His chest hurts, a wide band of pressure-agony where the seatbelt snapped taut and his neck feels like it does when he's fallen asleep on his couch. He doesn't even want to _think_ too hard, thanks to the pain in his head. "Are you bitten?" he asks again, groping for the Mossberg, fallen into the wheel well of the passenger's side. Weapons.

"What…?" Distracted, Sofia runs a hand over herself. "N-no, I don't think so." She looks over her shoulder. There's a bruise on her cheek, already dark against her skin. "Jim, we've got to get out of here, the car's shot and those… _things_ …"

"What happened?" Brass swings his legs out of the car and leans heavily on the shotgun. He isn't young any more. Still pretty tough, dammit, but not young. He gropes with his free hand for the car door and hauls himself upright with a groan. Sofia backs off, out of his way, and he doesn't know whether that's an insult or compliment.

"You hit that woman…" Sofia's hand fiddles over her mussed hair, as she looks around. When her face swings back towards him, Brass sees her pupils are blown and shocky. "She was still alive, Jim. She was alive, when you hit her."

"How're you fixed for ammo?" It's not that he doesn't feel regret. It's not that at all. But priorities are priorities and right now one alive Brass and Sofia have it all over one dead bystander. If he lives, he can worry about regret then.

'Uh…" He looks, sees she doesn't have either of her guns. Sofia turns, like she's actually going to go look for them. Brass sighs, grabs her by the arm and presses his service pistol into her nerveless grip. "It pulls a little to the left, so be sure to compensate. You need to shoot for the head," he explains, as he's explained to rookies—regardless of their chronological age—each of the six (Jesus, has it _really_ been six?) outbreaks before. He pokes one blunt finger at the center of Sofia's forehead and she shies away. "Taking out the brain's the only way to take them down permanently. Above all, don't let them bite you. Avoid fluid contact if you've got open wounds."

Sofia swallowed thickly and nods. "You know…I thought you were kidding, at first."

Brass smiles and pets her on the arm. This time she doesn't flinch. "They all do."

***

Brass must have hit his head harder than he thought; his aim's off and when he takes the shot, he only blows off about half the zombie's face and doesn't do nearly as much damage as he'd like. He curses quietly under his breath and chambers a new shell.

More of them are coming all the time, drawn by the sound, the smell, the possibility of living flesh.

"Jim, we're not going to make it." Sofia looks over her shoulder at him. She still looks a little shocky, eyes wider, darker than normal.

"The hell we're not." Brass takes the second shot and the zombie's head blows like a ripe melon. They fall back another several feet up the debris laden street. One of the apartment buildings is on fire, sooty clouds of smoke pouring out of shattered windows and making visibility tricky. It's not nearby, but Brass can also smell burning metal, oil, coolant.

"The lab's more than a mile from here and we've barely made it forty feet." Sofia pops her clip, checks the mag. "And we're running out of ammunition."

"Don't be a punk," Amy—the seven year old—pipes up. They found her and her younger sister Samantha hiding in the guard station of the nearby parking garage. Amy's got a tire iron. Samantha, barely four, has a wrench, dragging on the ground. Both weapons are tacky with blood and Brass hasn't had the time or heart to find how it got there.

They haven't seen a single working, moving car. Neither one of them has cell signal anymore and neither Brass nor Sofia remembered the radio from the car. Neither one of them suggests going back for it either.

"Yeah," Brass echoed with an ironic glance at Sofia. "Don't be a punk."

Unwilling, a smile crooks Sofia's mouth. She takes aim and pings two more zombies.

***

"So…" Sofia looks away and swallows hard while Brass rips the sleeve off her shirt and uses it to bind off the gouge in her arm. Not a zombie bite, fortunately; sheer bad luck, getting thrown down and sideways into a broken storefront window when a burning car finally blew. "Tell me again why it's so vital we get to the crime lab?"

Brass finishes his field patch and slides down next to her on the storeroom wall. The sweating concrete is marginally cooler. "David was trapped in the morgue when I spoke to him and I haven't been able to get through to any of the others. The lab's responsible for identifying the strain." He straightens his legs out gingerly, each of his knees popping dryly, and sighs. "It's also, incidentally enough, where the strains of anti-toxin are kept."

"Anti-toxins?" Sofia's head turns sharply. She's sweating, smearing the half mask of gore and soot on her skin. "There's a cure?"

"Yeah." Brass shrugs, keeps one ear out for the muffled thuds of the zombies against the storeroom door. "How do you think we stopped all the previous outbreaks?"

"Mr. Brass, are we gonna die here?" Amy looks up at him. Samantha is curled against her sister's side, thumb firmly in her mouth and her eyes wide. She still has a death grip on the wrench, though.

"Oh no, sweetheart," Brass assures her, ignoring the look Sofia gives him. Sometimes it's very obvious that Sofia has no children of her own. "We're gonna be just fine."

Brass gives himself twenty minutes to catch his breath and case the joint with his eyes. They'd gotten forced into the parking garage by the growing swarm of undead. It worries him a little bit that they seem to be multiplying so quickly; it suggests that they're either close to the outbreak epicenter or that they're facing one of the fast 'wildfire' strains that could wipe out half to two-thirds of the city before it's either stopped or burns out. He wonders briefly how far the contagion's spread; whether they were able to quarantine the city fast enough.

Then he shakes himself and focuses on the matter at hand.

The HVAC system's a total wash; that thin metal wouldn't support anyone but the kids and even if it would, Brass's knees and back have a few choice opinions about the idea of crawling _anywhere_ especially in all this Kevlar.

Brass gets to his feet, grunting and using the now useless shotgun as a crutch. Sofia looks up at him curiously. "Jim?"

"Going to have a look around. See if there might be another way out of here." He pats her unhurt shoulder. "Stay here with the kids. Give a holler, if…" He glances at Amy and Samantha again and finishes with, "If."

Sofia glances at the kids and nods. Brass empties his belt pouch of bullets and hands them over to her.

"Be right back," he promises.

It actually doesn't take long at all to locate the other door, mostly hidden behind a row of industrial shelving loaded with cleaning products.

Things get a bit dodgy after that, though.

***

"You all right?" Brass shouts to Sofia, across from him. Like him, she's got her back to one of the plaza statues, waiting for the next wave. _Less than three blocks from the lab,_ he thinks.

"Yeah." Sofia nods, head down. She's fumbling to reload her clip, bullets slipping from her fingers to tinkle dully against the stone.

Samantha is clinging to his leg like a little monkey, and he takes a moment to bend—oh, his back doesn't like that _at all_ \--and hoist her up onto his shoulders. "You need to hang on, sweetheart," he says. "Can you do that?"

She hasn't said a word yet; he only sees her nod from the tail of his eye and feels her small hands fist harder in his vest and equally tiny knees and feet press hard into his sides. Amy is busy obliterating the head of a zombie with her tire iron. Kid's got a hell of a swing on her.

Sofia's having a hard time of it. Just the existence of the zombies was hard enough—and Brass is planning on putting a word in the ears of the Powers That Be about that when this is all over—but as they get closer to the crime lab, she's starting to recognize some of the faces on the shambling corpses and that's a total mind fuck any way you look at it.

The worst was probably Archie.

He hadn't been completely dead when they found him, gutted and sobbing. Sofia had dropped to her knees, horrified and making helpless gestures with her hands, as if she could piece him back together like molding clay. Brass had picked up the pistol from where she'd dropped it and put one right through Archie's eyes.

Kid couldn't have been thirty.

"He was dying," he says, to Sofia's burning and outraged look and lifts her to her feet. "And he would have done the same for you." Actually, he suspects Archie would not; he's always seems curiously soft underneath all the sarcasm, but it's what you _want_ to believe of your friends and coworkers and it’s as fitting a eulogy as anything else Brass might say. "Don't knock it."

"Are we almost there?" Amy looks like a golliwog, painted in rusty shades rather than blackface, and there's a cold ugly light in her eyes that Brass both admires and worries about. He's got to give it to her, though; she's a survivor. Watching her kneecap and then bludgeon a zombie into soggy bits is a sight to behold.

Brass hoists Samantha a little higher on his back, and she lays her head on his shoulder. "Yeah. We're almost there, kid."

"And then we'll be safe, right? With the cure."

Somewhere off to the west, Brass can see smoke, thick and rolling. The city is burning. Something's gone wrong, this time, really _wrong_ ; he can feel it in his water. They haven't seen any of the rescue teams in their armored buses, haven't seen any of the choppers and Amy and Samantha were the last and only living people they've encountered since abandoning the car.

Still, he's not going to say any of that to Amy.

"Yeah, hon. We'll be safe."

Amy looks at him, but her eyes don't change.

***

"There it is." Brass points at the lab, just barely visible across the flat expanse of the plaza. The smoke is thicker now, though not so thick they can't seen the remains of the jumbo jet broken to pieces all across the skyline. Brass feels dimly convinced it isn't the only one, and wonders how far any of them got before falling out of the sky like the heavy metal they are. Wonders if anyone or any _thing_ survived to spread the contagion further.

Sofia stoops and picks up a satphone off one of the corpses. It's wearing riot gear and neither one of them wants to pull up the smoked face mask to see if it's anyone else they knew. The area is curiously deserted of anything except the final dead, though Brass doesn't feel any confidence that will continue long. Leading Samantha around by the hand, Amy picks up a gun from another corpse and hands it wordlessly to him. He checks the clip while Sofia fiddles with the radio. It's about half full. He scavenges bullets, loads it and hands it back to Amy.

"Aim for the head." He demonstrates, showing her how to sight and aim. Quick demo of the safety and an explanation of kick back while Amy nods solemnly, taking it all in the way she probably once devoured books about Harry Potter and the latest Barbie fashions. Or something. Her first shot is wobbly and hesitant. Her second, while still wildly inaccurate, is not.

He finds another couple guns for himself and Sofia and all the bullets he can find. There's plenty; it looks like the teams never even made it out of the plaza.

"Hello, is anyone there?" Sofia is flitting from channel to channel, searching for a coherent live signal. "Can anyone read me, come back?"

"They're going to have the blast doors down inside," he tells Amy and Samantha, squatting creakily to draw a diagram in the dust on the red tile. "To protect against the zombies. So we're going to have to make some creative detours. If something happens to me or Sofia, this is the route you're going to want to take to the central lab."

Amy squats too and her finger hovers over his, whispering to herself a near silent chorus of _left, left, second right…_

"Catherine?" Sofia's voice strengthens and catches; Brass looks up sharply. "Oh my God, Catherine…"

The channel is staticky, but Catherine's voice is unmistakable through the drop outs. "…ral lab…Stage Three…lost down there. Sara isn't…and Warrick and Greg. Second level through…and get down that way. Casualties… Strain…"

"Catherine, you're breaking up," Sofia attempts to squelch in over the signal. "Repeat, come back."

Static is her only answer.

"Catherine, come back," Sofia says again, her voice starting to crack.

"C'mon," Brass says, feeling his shoulders start to hunch. He hunts in his jacket for the dog eared roll of Tums and chews up a couple, chalky and falsely sweet. "We've been out here too long. Let's go."

Sofia swallows hard and nods, clipping the satphone to her belt.

The main facility doors are in lockdown; several inches of steel and—if he knows his techs—probably booby-trapped. They circle around to the back, where the loading bays will be their best hope.

Jim's edging around the building when something slams into him. He dimly hears Sofia's shouted, "Jim!" and Amy's piercing scream, but mostly he's preoccupied with the slavering thing on top of him, gray skinned and already puffing up and rotting in the heat. It's eyes are milked over and there's something on it's teeth that reeks like raw hamburger and sewage. Brass knows the guy, sort of. One of the morgue hands, he thinks.

Doesn't stop him from wedging his pistol under its chin and blowing the top of its skull off, though.

It falls to one side and Brass is scrambling, his skin crawling with the desire to get it _off_ and to have a clear field of vision and fire. Sofia offers him one filthy hand and hauls him to his feet.

"God," she says, sounding dull. "That was Barry."

Something moves behind her, only a shadow glimpsed from the corner of his eye, but Brass shoulder blocks her out of the way anyway, gun swinging up to fire. The first shot hits somewhere around the pectoral, the second the collar bone. From behind him, a third shot rings out, and one of the zombie's frost colored eyes disappears into ichorous blackness. It topples and Brass spares a glance over his shoulder to look at Amy.

Kid's got the shooter's stance down, her mouth a thin bitter line. "Shoot through the head, you said," she says and nods.

Brass nods back then turns to look at the zombie. Sofia crawls shakily to her feet. The shot must not have been completely on-center, because the zombie is writhing and twitching on the ground, still only _mostly_ dead.

"Jim…" Sofia's hand touches his shoulder, hesitant and scared, like she needs the contact. "Oh, shit, Jim… That…that's Grissom."

Brass looks down into the zombie's face. It's mouth and teeth are still working, chewing on air. Brass raises his revolver and puts two through the brain pan. "Not any more it's not," he says, and slings an arm around Amy's shoulders. "You did real good," he tells her.

"I can kill some more," Amy offers.

Brass sighs. "Yeah, no doubt you will," he agrees. Samantha holds out her arms and he hoists her up again. "C'mon, let's get inside and see how far down the rabbit hole _really_ goes."

Samantha's thumb comes out of her mouth and she says, loudly and clearly, "There is no spoon!"

Despite himself, Brass smiles.


End file.
